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Wally · 09-07-2009, 05:55 AM

I found this on the web, which links Jim with the philosopher Nietzsche - I quote just some excerpts:

Quote:

The Nietzschean Jim Morrison

Chapter One: Insider/Outsider

2) Jim Morrison as a Nietzschean

"Jim Morrison was probably the most effective populariser of Nietzsche in the twentieth century." [7]

"The first and greatest satyr alive today."
FWN [8]

In the first book-length biography of Morrison of the rock group the Doors, published in 1980 in the USA - i.e. some nine years after his death, its co-authors presented him very much as a Nietzschean. Not only was he said to be well-read in Nietzsche, but he too was a 'philosopher'
The authors assert that: "Like Nietzsche, Jim identified with the long-suffering Dionysos, who was without images, himself pure primordial pain and its primordial echoing." [9]
One of the co-authors, Danny Sugarman, went on to publish a (semi-fictionalised?) autobiography nine years later which included an account of his relationship with Morrison - Sugarman had a junior administrative role in the Doors LA office.
He claims that Morrison gave him books which exemplify his Nietzschean devotion to Dionysos. In a somewhat garbled account Sugarman describes the Doors' singer enthusiastically giving him a copy of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy', but then goes on to quote from W. F. Otto's 'Dionysos,' while seeming to describe another book by Karl Kerenyi : "I was digging through the books Jim had given me. I set down the one I was reading and picked up 'Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life.' [10]

In a later, thorough, and less hagiographical biography of Morrison, author Stephen Davis confirms that "nothing he read left a more lasting impression on Jimmy Morrison than his encounter with Nietzsche." [11]

While the posthumous 'legend' of Morrison has emphasised the Dionysian Nietzscheanism, the same image was being cultivated in his lifetime during the 1960's when writers on the popular music scene obviously longed to put a more intellectual spin on a hitherto lowbrow culture. Among those writers was Richard Goldstein, who in 1967 called the emerging 24 year-old singer and song-writer with the Doors a 'Shaman Superstar', going on to say that Morrison "suggests you read Nietzsche on the nature of tragedy to understand where he is really at. His eyes glow as he launches into a discussion of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle for control of the life force."
[12]

4) Wilson's Nietzsche

Morrison read Colin Wilson's 'The Outsider' - published a year before 'On the Road' - when he was about fifteen [23]. Wilson is an English writer who created a stir by producing a philosophically mature work at the age of twenty-four. [24] Wilson later noted with a sardonic irony that he "was at least as important as Sartre and Camus, a real British home-grown existentialist." [25]
Wilson also had something of an affinity with the American 'Beat Movement.' [26] The leading Beat poet Allen Ginsberg - who therefore had a profound influence on Morrison's own poetry - met Wilson in 1978. Recollecting the meeting, Ginsberg wrote: "we'd not encountered before, though 'Outsider' and 'Beat' ethos had theoretically some sense of spiritual expansiveness and hermetic insight in common." And yet remained mystified as to how Wilson could have got that "open mind". [27]

The main interest for us though is Wilson’s treatment of Nietzsche in 'The Outsider' and how this influenced Morrison's own Nietzscheanism. [28] It is a view of Nietzsche which probably has its root in those passages in his first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy' (section 7), where it is said that the character of Shakespeare's Hamlet "resembles the Dionysian man," [29] who seeks to conquer the "nausea of the absurd." [ib.]

Poor Ophelia
All those ghosts he never saw
floating to doom
on an iron candle.
JDM [30]

But the Existentialist despairs of ever being able to conquer, whereas the Nietzschean Dionysian man is very much a conqueror. The Existentialist interpretation of Nietzsche is therefore somewhat nihilistic - although Wilson will later insist that his own Existentialism is a positive philosophy (see his 'New Existentialism' e.g., Wilson 1980 passim). In 'The Outsider', Wilson says that, while Nietzsche saw the potential of genius in man, he felt that it was "only inertia" that "keeps him mediocre" [31]
This may be the seed of Morrison's idea for 'The Lords', who prey on this tendency to "inertia" - an idea we shall look into in more detail later [32]

In relation to this nihilistic notion of Nietzscheanism is the view that the profound thinker must necessarily experience pain - a masochistic tendency in the 'outsider' hero/genius. [33] Wilson takes a biographical approach to Nietzsche's work in keeping with a philosophy which says that one must live ones ideas. [34]
As a young man of 21 Nietzsche is said to have experienced a kind of pagan epiphany during a storm on a hill while witnessing a man killing two lambs as the man's son looked on. The mixture of thunder, death, sacrifice, blood and childhood innocence conspired to evoke a world of "Pure Will," that is "free", and is "without morality." [35]

Wilson quickly compares this with the "drunken" "Dionysian emotions" [36] that Nietzsche will describe in his 'The Birth of Tragedy'.

We may also compare this with Morrison's own epiphany, when he said he "experienced death for the first time." [37] As a four-year-old, he and his family chanced upon the immediate aftermath of a truck accident which had left a group of American Indians strewn across the road, bleeding to death. He later said, "At that moment, the souls of those dead Indians ... landed in my soul". [ib.]

Similar to Nietzsche's experience, we have the ingredients of blood, death, a sudden inexplicable catastrophe, blended with childhood innocence:

Like our ancestors
The Indians
we share a fear of sex
excessive lamentation for the dead
& an abiding interest in dreams and visions.
JDM [38]

15) Apollo & Dionysos

"The continual development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality."
FWN [221]

"Though I love the bull's neck on him; I also want to see the eyes of the angel."
FWN [222]

From his throat, dreams
sing to ships and sailors
nightmares of our time:
island universe
dark with narcotic
blooms
vanishing
over quicksilver
waters ...
[from 'Some Deaths', W. Lowenfels (1964)]

How do the antinomies of life/death instincts play against Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian antinomy in 'The Birth of Tragedy'?
Brown devotes a whole chapter to the latter in 'Life Against death.' [223] Brown understands Apollo and Dionysus as a process of sublimation. [224] The 'Greek Dionysian' [225] of Nietzsche is an example of the Apollonian sublimation of the primitive Dionysian. The latter, unsublimated, is the Dionysian "witch's brew" Nietzsche talks of, [ib.] which can be found, according to Brown, in de Sade and Hitler, for example.

"The mass death in the war for the glory of the German race is the apotheosis of this witches' dance." Reich [226]

The sublimated Greek Dionysian consciousness, on the other hand, can be discerned in the Romantics, like Blake, and in their 'heirs', Nietzsche and Freud. [227] These have taken the first steps towards the immense task of "constructing a Dionysian ego" [ib.] according to Brown - but is this not a wilful paradox?
The ego, after all, is a construction of the Apollonian and its principle of individuation, [228] and is therefore alien to the Dionysian which eschews all individualism. [229] Camille Paglia, looking back at the "sixties vision" of Morrison, calling him "brilliant and learned", says that "no one can control Dionysus", and that "we can never totally harmonise Apollo and Dionysus, but we have to try." [230]

And here we must look towards Reich who's influence has been bubbling under. He advocates a complete Dionysianism which some might fear as being too unrestrained, too 'unsublimated'. It is said that Morrison read Reich's book 'On the Function of the Orgasm' carefully, making his own marginalia. [231]

Chapter Seven: Poet-Philosopher

23) Doktor Dionysos

"I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint."
FWN [341]

"The primeval world has stepped into the foreground, the depths of reality have been opened, the elemental forms of everything that is creative, everything that is destructive, have arisen, bringing with them infinite rapture and infinite terror ... Age-old laws have suddenly lost their power, and even the dimensions of time and space are no longer valid."

[342]

"The worshippers of Dionysus cast off their worldly concerns and join in a dance. This dance is an innovation of the god and he is present in it. All music derives from this desire to dance together, in a community that embraces each of us, and cancels our separation. The chorus that we form tells us the story of the god, and also the story of those who separate themselves, as we all must separate ourselves, from the pure communion, so as to embark on some fatal project of our own.
Out of the dance there steps the tragic hero, whose fate appals and fascinates his fellow dancers. He acts apart, affirms himself, and is destroyed, sinking back into the unity from which he briefly emerged."
Scruton [343]

Ultimately, what kind of philosophical positions does Morrison's Nietzscheanism lead us?
Firstly, it presents us with the problem of a 'pure' Dionysianism; of the difficulty we have in even being able to conceptualise such a thing - the abyss it offers tempts us to oblivion. Perhaps this is a problem of perception, as Morrison's Lords suggests.
As Nietzsche acknowledges: "If, however, we felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol would stand by us absolutely ineffective and unnoticed." [344]

A solution to this is the positing of a duality: i.e. the anti-Dionysian has those qualities which the Dionysian negate: both are defined in turn against the other - opposition gives them Being. We think we know what the Dionysian is because we know what the anti-Dionysian is and vice versa.

The anti-Dionysian is called the Apollonian, of course: -

"And lo! Apollo could not live without Dionysus!"
FWN [345]

The Dionysian - "the eternal life beyond all phenomena". FWN [346]

But another problem arises - whence the 'phenomena'?

Whence the Apollonian?
If the Dionysian is 'life' in its totality, then what is the Apollonian?
Is not the Apollonian [i.e., phenomena] therefore 'beyond' all life just as the Dionysian [i.e., life] is 'beyond' all phenomena?
If this duality is maintained, then the Apollonian must be a metaphysical force beyond life itself, and yet able to give form to life.
[347]

The Apollonian therefore is the eternal realm of the gods, the realm of myth and the supernatural.
The Dionysian is - in its pure sense - the godless, primal world of Becoming: life in the raw.
The Apollonian is the world of phenomena created by the gods, or rather by the Lords and facilitated by the connectors.

Morrison's philosophy is then an invitation for us to live as gods, creating art, elaborating myths, and most of all, expanding our perceptions, in order - as he put it - to "deepen a strange hue in the clan tartan." [348]

This will involve the dangerous business of plunging periodically back to the roots, into the unfathomable abyss of the Dionysian, before heroically emerging from that underworld, ready to create once more in the searing sunlight of the Apollonian.

For Morrison, poetry had superseded philosophy. His interest in philosophy being less about ideas, but about how philosophers "have used words, have used language ... I appreciate philosophy these days from the standpoint of poetry, the use of one word next to another word, next to another word, next to another word. So, philosophy is semantics."
[22]

'The philosophers of the future' then, will be poet-philosophers or philosopher-poets - like Blake, like Nietzsche ... and like Morrison.

The flowering
of godlike people.
JDM [349]

I cut out all the references and bibliographies for reasons of space -
Ref:
Moody Lawless: The Nietzschean Jim Morrison
http://m-o-o-dy-l-a-w-l-e-s-s.blogsp...-morrison.html